Why Junior Developers Don't Ask Questions (and what you can do about it)

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Hey folks, I have one from experienced devs today. This one's really important to me. I'm hoping that by the end of this, if you feel inspired to go share it back to this Reddit thread, that would be super awesome. It's an experienced devs and it's titled how to deal with a junior who does not ask questions. Uh summary here is basically this person is saying trying to give a junior dev some tickets that they think they can handle. Um but once this junior gets stuck, they basically don't reach out for help. they don't ask questions despite this engineer saying like um you know please do ask people on the team you know reach out to me he says if I don't ask him he just won't tell and he said he told me he struggles with the large project and I told him the best

way to learn is to try and ask questions right um and then he goes on to say like you know I'm kind of scared for this person because like the junior like it's really tough for juniors out there for getting jobs and like like this guy's got a job like I just want to help you right So he's like um you know it's chaos for junior dabs. Um he's like but without going further in it my colleague was extremely lucky getting in in the first place. So I really want him to work for this company long enough where it would look great on his resume. He is shy and introvert if that helps. Would love some advice. So I'm going to talk about this. This one is extremely important to me like I said because I have to work with people like this. I've had to do this over the past five years of working at Microsoft and um like it's just it's super important to me.

Um and I don't want to say like I've solved this problem because I don't think that I have but I've been working on it and I want to talk through it. So um context we don't have from this and maybe it's later in the thread or or um in the comments and stuff. I don't see it in the original post, but um is this person working remotely is a big factor that I would like to kind of call out. So um I'm going to start talking about this from the perspective of like remote work in particular, but um see if I can touch on like you know other factors where that's not the case. But I've noticed in particular a handful of things that contribute to people just simply not asking questions or asking for help despite uh lots of communication from all sorts of people around saying like hey like don't hesitate reach out for help please ask questions.

It's almost like no matter how much you say it it doesn't actually matter. And I'm not saying that you should stop saying it, but I don't think it's sufficient. And that feels very frustrating because, you know, it's like telling someone a hundred times like just do this, just do this, just do this. And then they still don't. And then you confront them about it and they're like, "Yeah, I wasn't comfortable." Or, "Oh, I don't know." Um, but it to me it means that there's more to do. So I notice in particular we have a few factors that come into play. One of them is going to be remoteness. So if you have say you have a team that's located in a particular area and then you have remote employees or if everyone's remote and your core team has been together for a while but you're bringing on new people that are remote.

This is one factor I want to talk through. Another one is that I find that some individuals hyperfocus on titles and things like that and they get scared, which you might be listening or watching this and going like, "Well, that's dumb. That's stupid. Why would they get scared just because of someone's title?" It's not for you to get to decide if that's dumb or stupid. Um, the reality is that some people do and we have to navigate that. We have to make sure that we can help support people and give them an environment where they have psychological safety. They should be able to ask questions to people and not get freaked out. The third thing that I want to make sure that we can cover is that I think that there are things like either language or just different communication styles that have a really big impact on this too.

And when you start tying these things together, I'll probably think of a couple more. Like you might have someone that is like, "Okay, I'm being told I should do this." And then they have a few experiences where they're like, "I'm absolutely not doing that again." And it's not because someone was actually being a piece of to them. It's because of how they interpreted a situation where they felt like, you know, they either weren't being supported or the opposite where they were feeling kind of cast out from it. So that's kind of what I want to chat through. I guess one of the four things is like just around people's personality types. Um because uh and I'll factor this into the remote the remote talk which I'll just kind of start with that but um some personality types I feel like will not be successful um with remote work.

So to get into it starting with remote work um it's challenging because there's a lot of things from a communication perspective that we take for granted. I think and I I'm assuming many people listening to this or watching it have, you know, done remote work now and they're used to it or have at least experienced it. And if you've only done that, then that's the only thing you know. But if you've done both, when you compare like in person to remote, uh especially with people you've never worked with before, there's a lot of things like body language, tone of voice, right? uh because even just being on a call is not sufficient to get the full experience. There's a lot of things that we take for granted in terms of communication. And when you keep dialing these things back, right? You know, the most dialed back being like, you know, a comment in a PR or like a chat message.

You've you've removed so many different things and then people are left to they invent them in their head. They invent the tone of voice, right? They invent what someone's looking like when they're when they're saying these things. And I don't necessarily mean like they're playing this out in their head like a total visual, but they literally will invent how someone is is feeling when they're talking to them. And the problem is that if you start to have a bad experience where you're like, hm, it kind of seems like this person is annoyed with me. They might not be at all. But if you start to think that, then what happens is you start reading their messages in this way where you're like, "Ah, I'm bothering this person. H like I don't want to do that." And you basically self-sabotage. And in my opinion, it almost doesn't matter how many times we tell people just keep reaching out like everyone wants to help you.

they start building up this idea from their lived experience where they're like, I hear what you're saying, but I'm just not going to do that because that's not how it's actually working. So, I find that there is a really big barrier when it comes to remote work because of this. Right now, I will say that I've worked and I wanted to bring up the personality type thing here because I have worked with some people that do an absolutely outstanding job of this and like they just are unfased by it. Like, oh, you know, I'm supposed to reach out to so and so for help and they're busy. No problem. I'll reach out to another person. Cool. I'm not going to be blocked. Or I've asked this person 10 questions. No problem. Like, they said that they're not bothered by it. I'll believe them.

totally cool and they just go about like their way and they're like I said they're unfased by it and I have seen a dramatic difference in terms of like onboarding success ramp up period everything early in career progression from the people that operate like this and in some cases it's not even like they're doing something like completely outstanding or extraordinary. Don't get me wrong, I I work with great people, but it's almost like that sort of just expectation of reaching out and talking to people seems like it is the extraordinary thing and it shouldn't have to be. Give me one sec because I have to switch lanes here and this part is a bit of a cluster. Okay, buddy. What a crappy spot of the highway. Um so my my observation my set of data is not like extremely large but for my lived experience trying to onboard people like this the majority of people I would say probably like 85% are not the people that just like can thrive in this way.

So they end up being remote and it takes them a while to feel comfortable reaching out to people. Okay. So this is even going as far as to give them like an onboarding buddy. Um, you know, we have an intern right now who has like an intern buddy um who's great and the and so the buddy's great, the um the intern's great and like he absolutely reaches out to him when he needs help and stuff and like they have conversations and he's kicking ass, right? But like he he'll ask me questions in like one-on- ones cuz he wants to learn about stuff, but he's totally comfortable doing it. Now, I don't think we did anything magical with him. We've told him like we have everyone else like, "Hey, welcome to the team. Like, ask questions, reach out. So and so is going to help get you on boarded and stuff.

You can make sure like any questions you can go to them like they're they're kind of on point to make sure that they're here to support you and Yep. So he's like one of these individuals that just really fits into that, but it's not common. So around this, I don't like like I said, I don't have all the answers to this stuff. I just wanted to talk through it. But around this, one of the things that comes to mind is like I don't think that words enough when we say like, "Oh, just reach out, ask for help. It's okay." I don't think words are enough. We need to like almost go out of our way where our actions speak louder than words. Which means like this person in the Reddit thread was like if I don't reach out to him, he's not giving me updates.

And I think it's almost like if that's the case, like we need to like build a pattern where we are reaching out be like, "Hey, like just checking in like and kind of showing people um that you're there to answer questions, which seems like it's a bit of a pain in the ass. Like that's a lot of extra work. I don't want to have to go messaging someone every day, but like I genuinely wonder if we need to build up some of that and like basically almost force the conversation where it's not just, "Hey, do you have any questions?" They might just say no. Come on, buddy. Speed up. Just It's like 10 car lengths. Just go. Thank you. Um instead of just saying, "Do you have questions?" and then being like, "No." and then the conversation doesn't go anywhere. It's like, hey, like let's chat about this.

Hey, like how is this going and like walk me through it or like kind of asking them questions where they it's not just a a no and then the conversation's done. It's like any response they give has to start conversation. And in my mind, I'm very curious of getting into a pattern like this is demonstrating to people like we need to practice talking with each other. Sounds kind of silly, right? Sounds kind of silly cuz most of us that are on boarded and don't have a problem reaching out for help and stuff, why would you need to practice? Like you just live it and it's okay. But I genuinely wonder for some of these other individuals if we need to force the practice.

The reason I come to this conclusion is that uh it's different sort of challenge but I had to teach an intern before how to problem solve which sounds kind of ridiculous um but she's very smart you know very smart kid and um what happened was anytime she got stuck she would just like want us to solve the problem and initially we were kind of just doing that but then we realized like we've created a pattern and she's just she knows if I ask I get answer so she doesn't problem solve. So we had to teach her the other way where it was like we need we need you to practice doing the other thing which is when you ask us for help we are going to be asking you what you tried so far. Oh crap. I wanted to go but this truck in front of me is too slow.

I got to get out of this lane cuz I'm going uh 5 miles an hour. Um so this just goes back to like the actions are louder than the words. I think they need to be. Uh and I say this just because I've tried the words for 5 years and it's not enough. Most of the time it's just simply not enough. So, I'm saying this out loud because I I want other people to like, you know, maybe this is a confirmation for them that it's like that's why it feels frustrating. I get it. Come on. You got to speed up. Get out of here. One more lane. Sorry, folks. I got to watch in front of me for brake lights and then I got to look for an opening behind me. I need chameleon eyes for this. Come on. Oh, there's another Corvette. We saw one earlier today.

Those mid engine ones. I love them. There he goes. Bye. Um, okay. I'm never going to move over, apparently. We did it. Nice. Go team. Okay. So, um I think I'll park that part of the conversation cuz I don't want to like just go in circles around that, but I think the remoteness is definitely a challenge. Um, the next thing to probably talk about is trying to remember what all my topics were at the beginning. Um, I think communication style. I want to focus on this a little bit because I've seen this come up come up a lot especially when we have things like remote work. um people that are junior that especially or early in their career um they don't they might not have the lived experiences of working with other people. Again, like something a lot of us take for granted cuz we're like we've been doing this for years.

It's just you just work with other people. It's so easy. But like no, you had to learn how to do that. And for you it might have come easier for sure, but it doesn't for everyone. And when you layer in remoteness, it makes it even more challenging. So something that a lot of people don't think about actively is like literally everyone communicates differently. Everyone, right? The more experience you have working with people, the more patterns you see and how people communicate and stuff. And like, you know, I'll give you an example. Like I have a PM on my team, loves to call. So out of nowhere, he'll call. And I like I even told him yesterday I'm like hey like don't do that. Not that I have a problem talking to him but I'm like that doesn't work for me.

I can't just you know if if I'm in the middle of something and middle of like my busy work I'm not taking a call from you and then don't just leave me a message that says call because I'm busy. So like leave me something meaningful that I can follow up with you on and absolutely I will and if you're free later I'll call you back. But it's just different ways of communicating. When you layer on to this remoteness, when you layer onto this different cultural backgrounds, different uh like language barriers, you can have all sorts of crazy challenging problems. And the the most like simple scenarios, which should be simple, can become very complex very fast simply because of some of these factors. God, I hate this highway. Um, and like again over the last 5 years, this is one of the most common things I've had to deal with.

And I can absolutely understand that if someone started experiencing something like this early on in their job that they would be like, I don't want to ask questions anymore. Right. It's it takes so much effort to build up someone's confidence in something and it takes so little effort to tear that all down. So the the I was talking to someone about this today at work and I was giving them an example where I said um if you have two individuals on a team, okay, um you might have a more senior person communicating with a junior person. And I gave them the example because this is not an uncommon thing at Microsoft and I'm sure lots of other places, but like English may not be their their native language. So immediately you have a potential for communication barrier. Okay, just because of language plus on top of that different cultures.

So another potential for communication barrier. You layer on top of that remoteness. Another communication barrier. That's already three. Okay. Now we layer on someone's style of communication mixed into that. Now we got four. Uh and also you have the um the power dynamic where someone's junior, someone's senior. So there's a lot of things at play. Um consider the scenario where you have someone who's more senior saying to someone who's more junior, why did you make that change? Why did you do it this way? When I say it that way, right, if I say it a particular way, and I could stress it even more, I could say, why did you do it that way? If I say it like that, it sounds condescending. Sounds like I'm saying like, "Yeah, you must be an idiot. Why would you do it that way?" It's what it sounds like.

Now, the other way that I could ask that is like, if I could add in one more word, it's like, "Oh, why'd you do it that way?" That's curiosity. It's the same sentence. Now it's curiosity, right? But when you layer in all those other things I said, you could have someone, and I say this as a matter of fact because I have lived it. You could have someone who's being literally genuinely curious about something. Okay? They're they're like, "Oh, like I just want to know where this came from. Like I'm very curious. Like where like how did you come up with this pattern? Why are we doing this?" Like they're trying to understand the background and the person on the receiving end keeps getting things like this going, "Holy this person is trying to tear me down at every opportunity. They're always making me feel like crap and then like who's at fault here?" Cuz now you have a situation where you have friction being created.

You have someone who's like being completely torn down because if that's how someone was actually talking to them, I don't blame them. And then you have another person who's like, I don't understand why this person is so like so much friction, so much like resentment for me. Like I I'm just trying to help. So these like it's this is a real scenario, okay? I'm not I'm not making this up. So, when we have things like this, it doesn't take a lot for that to happen. When we work at companies, where you have people of different backgrounds, where you're working remote, where you have juniors working with more senior people, it's all it's all very possible. Now, I've had different flavors of this exact same type of thing come up. Now fortunately when it's within my team where I have this sort of dynamic happening I can work with both people individually.

I can coach them both. I can work with them and say like hey like maybe here's a different way to think about how that interaction actually looks because you are perhaps interpreting what they're saying a different way. By the way, I have a little bit of background information because I've already talked to the other person, right? Like I can coach both people on it and then I can get them to come to this conclusion that maybe they should actually go talk together about this. When they're both not on my team, that becomes a little bit more challenging because it feels more one-sided. I have to be like, "Hey, I hear what you're saying about how this person's communicating with you. um maybe we should try to think about it a different way and get them to like buy into that idea. But this takes a ton of active coaching.

And I've said this on other videos, but I always will recommend that people try to have conversations with their colleagues. When you have friction like this, it is, you know, we self-sabotage on this kind of stuff like, "Oh, that's going to be the worst, hardest conversation. I'm going to avoid that at all costs. Yet, we basically make the rest of our working lives with this person agony. And every single time I have encouraged people to have a conversation, every single time I c I maybe I'm exaggerating. I literally can't think of one though. It's turned out for the better. And so many times it's because people don't realize that how they're communicating with each other is not in alignment. So back to the idea of juniors not asking questions. You may not realize, you may not realize, but either you or someone else on the team may have been communicating with them and made them start to feel like a total idiot.

Made them feel like they're not allowed to speak up about things. They're not allowed to feel a certain way. Um could be anything. Now, next thing I'll layer in here is the the title dynamic. This is a pretty real thing. We were talking about this at work today. Um, from from the perspective, this is not um necessarily for like new hires, but we were saying for our on call rotations, um, you might have someone who I I use myself as an example. if I have a I'm newer to the team. So now I've been on the team for a year and a half or so. Um so not that long and I'm just starting to get a little bit more com like confident slash comfortable on some of these things. But if I'm on call and I have a partner team where the person reaches out to me and they're like very confident that this is a problem that our team is responsible for.

I'm not going to argue with them. I'm not going to challenge that cuz I'm like, "Yeah, you're probably right." Cuz I don't have I don't have the confidence or the evidence or whatever to go back on that. So part of me, a large part of me is like, "Yep, like I'll take that at face value. let me go, let me go dig into it. Whereas some of the more senior people on the team, senior in terms of tenure in this case, they're able to very confidently push back and say like you haven't provided evidence that this is us. Like back that up. And we were discussing this and saying like definitely noticed that more junior people in these contexts have um you know much greater tendency to just lean into like oh they see principal engineer I'm only like you know entry- level software engineer like okay principal says so.

Um, and in our chat, someone had made a comment around like, "Yeah, like I don't know, like that doesn't really happen for me much." And someone said, "Yeah, but think about a time where you've been on like an incident bridge and a VP is saying like, you know, what's the status or like why isn't this fixed yet?" You absolutely have these situations or you have where you're like, oh my goodness, like it's the same thing. It's just that you know different levels that we're talking about they feel this pressure. So it's a very real thing. I have worked again with people at Microsoft in my teams where they get very nervous to talk to people that are higher level. All these things that I've been mentioning compound greatly with each other. I'm not saying it's solved by being in person necessarily. Um I because I don't think that would be the solution I would want to propose and I just don't think that that fixes everything.

Um but you can have this dynamic. Now the other thing is that I've worked with individuals where you know it's a more junior person kind of paired up with say a more senior person say at the principal level. This could be staff wherever you're working like someone that's you know multiple levels above and they basically through conversation again this could be miscommunication this could be language barrier this could be anything but they feel like they're the level that they need to perform at as a junior needs to be so high because the principal engineer or the staff whatever is basically also holding them to the same level like standard um as that principal or staff whatever and then they get fearful. They start avoiding, right? We've seen this kind of thing happen in like code reviews, right? You're brand new somewhere. Think about your your junior developer days or maybe you are junior.

Um you put up a code review. If you're a junior person on a new team for you and your first code review goes up, odds are it's going to get slammed with comments. Absolutely destroyed. Maybe not, but I've seen this happen a lot. And it's like that's not a bad thing. Like it's actually probably expected because this is your first time in the codebase. There's going to be so many things that people want to draw to your attention right in the beginning, right? They're trying to help you so that you can go learn these things for next time, right? Go fix up all this stuff. You know, you might not have known that's a convention. No problem. Here you go. I'll call all these spots out so I can help you. And that results in you getting 50 comments from one person. Like, and you go, "Oh my god, like this is terrible.

Like, people must hate me. I wrote the worst code ever." Again, if you're laughing at this going, "Yeah, well that person must be dumb." You don't get to decide how they feel. And I'll say that until I'm blue in the face. You do not get to decide how other people feel. That's it. The reality is some people will feel certain ways and you might not like that, but that's a reality. So I have seen enough instances where basically juniors get like basically scared off by more senior people and they start to avoid them. It reinforces this pattern for them where like if I interact with this person, I'm going to get crapped on. I don't like this. They're going to make me feel stupid. They're going to make me feel like I'm not good enough. They're going to make me feel like I'm bothering them. I know that they're super busy because they're principal.

They don't have time for me because I'm not important. their principle. They must be doing the most important stuff. So, they stop. They stop asking for help. And again, I said it already. You can keep saying it over and over, but I think actions must speak louder than words here. We need to go out of our way and we need to show them through actions. Which means if you are someone who is more senior and you're working with someone more junior like you need to basically like teach them to engage with you by you actively engaging with them if they're not. It needs to be demonstrated how much traffic could possibly be in one drive. Oh my god. Okay, I lost track of the topics I wanted to go over if I'm being totally transparent with you. Um, level talked about level. We talked about remoteness.

See, this is the problem with vlog entries because I was like in the beginning I'm like, I got these topics, I don't remember them now. Um, and then someone will comment cuz you have hindsight which is very powerful. You can rewind. Yeah, I don't know. Um, but I think honestly for this topic, like this is it's a real challenge. Uh, I think we have to think about this situationally for different people. It's not going to be a one-sizefits-all thing. Um, I think that if it's not if it's not addressed early, like it kind of just like it it basically compounds and gets worse much faster, right? Like you'll see people like they're not sharing status updates or like they're falling behind in their work and like they can't make any progress at all and everyone on the other side of this is like it's just so easy just reach out and ask for help but we often don't see what's going on behind the scenes for them to not do it.

Now, I think a final thing I wanted to talk about, I think I'm missing a topic that I brought up earlier, but something I wanted to talk about is that ultimately there will be some individuals where it's just not going to work, right? We we can't rule that out. That's entirely possible. Um, you could try everything. You could say, "Okay, we're going to use our words and make sure that people are aware and create a safe environment. We're going to take action and make sure that we are actively reaching out, engaging in conversation, making people feel comfortable, showing them time and time again that we're like, you know, available to help, we're not too busy to help them, that we'll unblock them like as quick as we can." You can be doing all these things. The reality is you may have individuals that simply just do not take the initiative, which is unfortunate.

It could be a product of their environment that they're working in. It could be a product of how engaged they are. Um, you know, for just to give you like a double whammy compounding example. You might have someone who's working remote and they're not um well equipped to work remote. Maybe it's focus issues, anything else, right? They're um they're like that. they're also not engaged in their work, right? So, they're like, "Okay, I'm on this team. I have this project, but like kind of sucks." So, you have someone who's like going to have a focus problem in the first place, and they're not really engaged in their work. They might just not really be in a good environment to get work done. And then you're trying to correct this problem or improve it.

But the reality is like that what would fix it probably is putting this person on a different team or project area or maybe if you know working remote is so difficult for them maybe they do need to be around like other people because they're getting distracted by other things. Like there could be so many situational things here that it's like no matter what you're trying to do it's kind of outside of your control. So something to keep in mind, right? I want to acknowledge that this is a very challenging thing to navigate. I say this as someone who's been doing it for 5 years. I personally have found like in my experience it seemed much easier like and let me add a disclaimer. I I enjoy remote work. I enjoy the flexibility of hybrid work. I think it's great. I don't think I would ever want to go back to being in office 100% of the time.

So, that's my disclaimer. I found that what we just talked through was significantly less of a challenge when we were all in office. And I say that and my reflection on this is because we can reduce like communication barriers, right? things like body language, stuff like that gone. Sorry, gone in terms of having barriers. That's not going to be realistic for everywhere. But when you can have real inerson conversations, you can see the body language. You have a lot more information to work with. um when we're in person, we have these opportunities where it's less of a pain in the ass to like reach out and ask someone something, right? The example I gave with the the intern that I had once upon a time that we had to like work on on problem solving, she could turn in her chair. This is how it I've told this story before, but she could turn in her chair and I could see in my peripheral vision.

I could see she's gonna ask me a question. And I could see I could like feel the hesitation when she would turn to ask a question cuz she's scared. She's nervous. She's like, I don't want to bother people, but like I need to ask. But I could see it. And I could also see and feel the difference when we helped her learn to problem solve for her own. She would do the same thing where she would turn in her chair and I could see her out of my peripheral vision thinking. When I go to ask this, I know Nick is going to say to me, "What have you tried so far?" And I could see it over time where she would do this and she would sit there and think and then she'd turn back to her desk and she'd unblock herself and she'd try something or she'd have to come back to me and when she would be more confident about asking the question cuz she's tried something there was far less hesitation.

You could literally like feel the difference of this happening. So there were some benefits to being in office that way. I also, you know, admittedly worked with people where we had far fewer like um, you know, people working either from different countries and things like that. So, that's a difference. I'm not, again, I'm not saying that that makes it like, oh, then we should not work with people from different countries. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that all of these things contribute to these challenges that we might not actively be thinking about. So when we are going to try and improve this situation and it feels frustrating, there are a lot of things that are working against us here. So my, you know, most important takeaway from all of this is like said at the beginning, I don't have answers to all this, but I think awareness for people that are trying to navigate these situations about the different factors is helpful.

I think, you know, understanding I'm not going to wait at that red light after that person drove like 3 m hour and get out of here. Um, I think that recognizing that other people have these similar types of challenges with, you know, junior engineers, early in career people. Um, it's a it's a real thing. It's a real challenge, you know. So, I I hope that at a minimum, like those two things together give you a little bit of peace of mind that yes, this is a challenging thing. um and a little bit of extra context for different things to try and think on and uh and see if you can work different angles of them because it's not going to be a one-sizefits-all solution for everyone. So, with that said, hopefully you found that helpful. If you did, I would really appreciate a share back to Reddit on this.

Uh, I can't remember the title because I've been driving for a while, but it was an experienced devs subreddit and it was something along the lines if uh, you know, anyone else with a challenges with the junior that won't speak up to ask questions or something like that. And I will remind folks if you are interested in having your questions answered on Code Commute, you can, you got a bunch of options now. You can leave them below in the comments. You can send a message to dev leader on social media. That's my main YouTube channel, has my edited videos. This is my vlog channel. And um otherwise, you can go to codecute.com and you can submit your question through the question form that I vibe coded and uh that'll send me a nice little email and I'll make you a video response. So, you can be kept totally anonymous if you if you message me or submit your question, but if you write it in the comments, it's public.

I can't I can't unpublic your comment for you. So, again, thanks so much for watching. Hopefully, that was helpful. If you got thoughts on this, you've experienced it either yourself as the person who felt like they couldn't speak up and get help. If you are on the other end of this as the more senior person offering guidance, would love to hear from you. How did you navigate this? What worked? What didn't? It's a real challenge. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.